Hi all,
Mobile Sand is an addictive and innovative action/reflection game featuring virtual sand.
It has been developed for the new generation of mobiles but there is also a java applet version playable online:
Enjoy,
Ariel
http://www.chronotext.org: my other java playground, for electronic arts (not the gaming company) lovers…
Hi there, great game, played up to and completed level 13, took me about 20mins.
Keep up the good work.
Andy.
Thank you Andy for the feedback!
20 mins for 13 levels?: hey, pretty good time! (note: these are only the demo version “easy” ones 
Great game!
Truely a great game there, perfect for mobile platforms!
How did you do it?
I’ve been trying to simulate sand (or water) realisticly for a long time, but the computations are just too wast.
are you willing to share any code on this, i’d love to see it!
Though i understand if you won’t since youre selling it.
GD! Great game, I hope you sell enough to fund your next work!
Good luck
truly addicting! I could be distracted with this for hours… 
Hey, thank you all for the great feedback!
Right guess… I can’t make the source code open for now: I’m still looking for some partner (publisher / dev. house / investor…) to bring the game to market (and eventually create new ones…)
Anyway, what I can say is that it’s a real technical challenge to make such a system run smooth (20-25 fps) on mobile phones (even if we talk about fast midp2 devices…)
What I can share, off-hand, are these few milestones from the road that led to the current Mobile-Sand:.
In 2003, I saw this great fluid simulation (w. source code) by Ben Fry.
I learned a few more about cellular automatas from threads like this one in the (old) processing forum
At the very end of 2003, I made this greeting-card with a very ineffective sand system (source code included, but you’re warned: it’s not the correct way to do it
Later on in 2004 I created the Book of Sand, featuring the beginning of a respectable sand system…
Then, I switched to mobile development, targetting Nokia Series 40 first, then realizing that it’s an utopy, then perfecting the system until it works good enough on fast midp-2 devices!
Cheers…
That’s awesome!
Now if I only had a version for my Treo650 (PalmOS) 
That thing has a sweet 320x320 display and a 312MHz ARM processor.
However I believe this will run on my wife’s phone, assuming she’ll let me mess around with it!
Good work
Thanks for the links, arielm! I’ve started on my own little project now. just for fun.
But i realize now how much work you must have put in your code!
The best simulation ive got so far handles about 15000 grains before it starts to drop in framerate.
great work on that Book of Sand thing btw!
hey jonas,
it’s great to hear about your experiments!
one more tip concerning the “ideal sand engine”:
the most critical aspect is of course speed but there is also another very important point: the shape of the sand…
or in other words: everything should be made to avoid sand dunes with silly 45 degree angles
ariel
This game looked awesome, though I couldn’t actually play it as my phone is a SmartPhone, but it’s apparently not smart enough to have real keys, they are only on the touch-screen, which was running the game at the time! 
But the tutorial looked amazing! :o
yeaaah, youre right. Your simulation looks alot better too.
I get the 45 degree hills
hmm, gotta think about this…
tip of the month: one solution to the square hills problem would be to apply a concept called “self organized criticality” to the sand system 8)